Reckoning

How do you reckon the costs of police corruption? Well, try this: In the year since seven Austin District tactical unit officers were indicted for shaking down federal undercover agents posing as drug dealers, prosecutors have dropped 120 narcotics cases in which those officers would have been involved as witnesses. That's 120 cases torpedoed because at least one of the cops involved turned out to be, at best, dubious and unreliable as a witness. What prosecutor is going to stake a case...

By Alina Selyukh and Marina Lopes WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A surge in mobile Internet usage has U.S. regulators considering whether to apply the same rules to fixed and wireless Internet traffic, and large technology firms are siding with consumer advocates to call for such a change. The Federal Communications Commission is now rewriting the so-called "net neutrality" rules, aimed at ensuring that Internet providers do not unfairly block or slow down users' access to...

In the 1964 movie "The Train," French Resistance fighters change train station signs to trick art-thieving Nazis into thinking their train is heading for Germany when it is doubling back to Paris. A German officer compares the station signs with his map, methodically but erroneously marking the train's progress. The matching of maps to other data indicating a vehicle's location is at the heart of a navigation technique known as dead reckoning. Nowadays, those Nazi officers might have...

If lawmakers in Springfield thought they maneuvered beyond the treacherous topic of pension reform with their December votes to begin rescuing the state's floundering pension system, they thought wrong. Chicago, with its enormously underfunded pension plans, is next in line. Three years into his mayoral term - after campaigning on a promise to fix pensions - Rahm Emanuel finally is ready to file legislation that would reduce the city's dangerously unfunded pension liabilities for...

"The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king," wrote William Shakespeare in "Hamlet." By having his father's murder re-enacted on stage, Hamlet reasons he can ascertain if his uncle is guilty of the crime. Hamlet anticipates some indication of remorse from his uncle king after seeing the truth of his actions spotlighted in public, and he gets it. "The Reckoning," starring Paul Bettany and Willem Dafoe, follows the same logic, as a company of...

GUADALAJARA -- " To the End of Reckoning " is a fly-on-the-wall docu that tracks a team of forensic investigators who deal with the victims of Mexico's high crime rate. Helmer/scribe Mauricio Bidault gained access to the Jalisco Institute of Forensic Science to spotlight the men and women in the grim but fascinating trenches of forensic science. Aside from the Premio Mezcal, "Reckoning," made for a mere $110,000, is also vying for the...

The custody feud between Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards is starting to sound like the pay-per-view promotion to a boxing rematch: "Sheen-Richards II: The Reckoning." Richards took the battle to another level Wednesday when she asked a judge to protect their daughters from Sheen, people.com reported. Sheen fired back that she "behaves as though she owns our children. She does not. A day of legal reckoning for her is fast approaching." Richards' lawyer, Neal Raymond Hersh, told People,...

This week Illinois lawmakers may reform the nation's worst-funded state pension system. After Monday's deadline for candidates to file petitions for the March 2014 Illinois primary, incumbents might vote for a pension bill, secure that angry public employee unions no longer could recruit candidates to challenge them. Should lawmakers pass the package negotiated by the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate? The lawmakers should expect to see the actual bill and the pension...

Instead of wailing, gnashing their teeth and bashing their heads against a fait accompli, Adlai Stevenson and the regular Democratic organization should recognize March 18 for what it really was--a day of (w)reckoning. For whatever reason, voters reckoned that they didn`t have to vote for the candidates slated by the party regulars. Furthermore, instead of chuckling with glee, the Republicans had better put their own house in order before they wake up and find themselves in the same political bed with the Democrats.

A budget watchdog said Thursday that Mayor Rahm Emanuel's effort to put off Chicago's pension "day of reckoning" could have dire consequences for the retirement funds, even as several aldermen lined up to back the mayor's stance. "We have less than 10 years to save the funds from insolvency - delay is not an option," said Laurence Msall, president of the nonpartisan Civic Federation. "The city's pension funds are already dangerously close to where they...

Mike Henderson and the Bluebloods Thicker Than Water (Dead Reckoning) Guitarist Mike Henderson may be best known for his retro-country recordings with Kevin Welch or the Dead Reckoners, but his flair for traditional blues is undeniable. Whether playing Hound Dog Taylor-ish slide, or blowing harp lines that would make Little Walter smile, Henderson deftly conjures the sound of '50s Chicago. The Bluebloods' second release alternates covers and originals, with...

More than a year ago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel traveled to Springfield and told state lawmakers that Chicago's "day of reckoning" had arrived as he unsuccessfully sought changes to the financially shaky government worker pension system he inherited. On Wednesday the mayor indicated he's going to try to push that day of reckoning into the future, an approach that helped create the pension mess in the first place. He also acknowledged that a solution is going to require...

High school reunions are forever days of reckoning, and in "Flyovers," Jeffrey Sweet's new play at Victory Gardens Theater, two smalltown Ohio schoolmates, now middle-aged, duke it out, both figuratively and literally. They are that inimitable pair, the geek and the bully, the `A' student and the party animal, the success story and the loser. Oliver (Marc Vann) is one of a syndicated TV twosome of dueling movie critics, with just enough celebrity sheen to enable him to come home for a bout of all-out revenge...

By David Sheppard NEW YORK, Sept 11 (Reuters) - On a sunny summer morning last month, a quiet Sacramento suburb was suddenly shaken by an explosion at the Elk Grove refinery, a small industrial plant that produces asphalt. Local firefighters rushed to battle the blaze, which was generating a "substantial" plume of black smoke and alarming local residents living just a few hundred feet away. A number of them called 911 to report the...

"The Verdict" (Sidney Lumet, 1982) at 3 p.m. on HBO Plus. "The Verdict" is an absorbing courtroom melodrama, pungently acted by Paul Newman, who digs down deep to show us the painful rebirth of a decent man, Francis Galvin, a Boston attorney on the skids, who's thrown a bone by his last remaining friend (Jack Warden). It's a case never meant for trial involving a young woman admitted to a Catholic hospital for her third child, who was given the wrong anesthetic and has...

Arthur Miller's "All My Sons," the remarkable 1947 drama that both understands the flaws of ordinary little men and howls with moral outrage at their consequences, usually plays out on AstroTurf, under a fake theatrical sun. But on Saturday night in the verdant forests of southwest Wisconsin, real fireflies danced in Joe and Kate Keller's backyard, and, as their son Chris Keller came to see the truth about his father, real bats hovered ominously in...

By Reviewed by Gary Dretzka, a Tribune features editor | March 26, 1989

Day of Reckoning By John Katzenbach Putnam, 368 pages, $19.95 Attention trend spotters: Expect the bogeymen of the `90s to be the same hairy, scary folks who turned campuses upside-down in the late `60s and early `70s. Call them terrorists, student radicals or spoiled rich kids, they held the attention of much of the nation from the 1968 Democratic Convention to the capture of hostage-turned-gunslinger Patty Hearst in 1974. Last spring, Elmore Leonard enlisted...

The day of financial reckoning for Chicago is not far off, with the city budget shortfall expected to near a record $1 billion in 2015 if major changes are not made to the government worker pension systems, city officials said Wednesday. That stark assessment, contained in the annual financial analysis prepared by Mayor Rahm Emanuel's top budget officials, overshadowed the fact that the city needs to close an expected $339 million budget gap predicted for next year. "The...

Great writers are great in different ways. There are the behemoths, the hairy apes of ambition, those who grapple with God and complain about Fate and try to head-butt the world into yielding its secrets: "Give it up, damn it!" And then there are the efficient storytellers, the ones who slip their way into cultural immortality by creating tales from which we just can't turn away. Norman Mailer was among the former, and Ira Levin, the latter. Both men died recently, with long and...